'Bad design is irrelevant'
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- gavinnosler0
david ogilvy did some research back in his days where he found that something like 70% of the advertising firms who had won major awards in creativity for their work were out of business shortly afterwards. ogilvy & mather's work wasn't the most pretty, but it did what it was supposed to. hopefully when you design you design with a client's goal in mind. i love just making things look pretty as much as the next designer. i guess you gotta find some middle ground. and of course there are times when you're allowed to just make it pretty. when you're trying to sell a lifestyle more than a product you can usually get crazy
- Dolan0
Design with purpose (as opposed to 'superficial' or 'pretentious' design) need not be ugly. What Rand is championing in his comment is simply that a design connect in an intelligent way with what it is communicating, and not be only a veneer (however plain or fancy) that is applied without any conceptual connection. Good design has reasoning behind it, what Rand calls 'bad' is design that is only skin deep --- a style layer applied as fancy frosting to disguise a lousy cake. Often this disguise gets extra fancy, becoming pretentious (literally 'pretending' to have some significance or meaning when there is none) or ostentatious, like a magician's classic misdirection technique. There have always been experimental graphic stylings, unconnected to any project or purpose, and they're eye candy which is often wondrous. By Rand's definition those things wouldn't be considered design, simply graphics. His admonition certainly isn't to quit, but to think. Designing means thinking.
- Mimio0
Now, only if the client could see things this way. usually they just say. "I like this, so make it like that"...and very often their own ideas or concepts concerning their own products are borrowed and reborrowed to point of ambiguity. Paul Rand lived in a simply world. Atleast a more direct one.
- Dolan0
Mimio, that's not true. Clients have always been foolish, conservative, timid, and ill-informed. If you read about Rand, you find his cantakerousness extended to his dealings with clients, and a lot of what he accomplished wasn't because the sheer brilliance of it overwhelmed the client, but because he fought and argued and backed up his design choices with reasoning and logic which was hard to disagree with. Doing great design is only one facet of getting great design produced. He was as good at defending his ideas as he was at conceptualizing and executing them --- a rare combination.
- thislandslid0
dolan, you put it perfect. much more eloquent than my attempt.
- nick0
well said.
Dolan, you should post here more often.
- Dolan0
Thanks. I used to post a lot more but I realized I had a disease and was addicted to NT and had to stop. For some reason my counter seems reset, thanks Buzzard. Now I only post when I've got something worthwhile to say, and I only read the threads which actually seem to be about design.
- paulrand0
words of wisdom